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Technology Stocks : BORL: Time to BUY! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Corbett who wrote (7594)	11/20/1997 1:57:00 AM
From: Kashish King	Respond to of 10836

Middleware only makes sense in the context of distributed computing systems. Client-server systems are a specific form of distributed systems in that there are only two partitions: client and server. Now, lets say you have a thousand people filling out a form on their own computer (the client) and submitting that information (a weekly time card or something) over the network to a program running on a server. That program is always "listening" for input from clients scattered around the network. Middleware is software which operates in the middle. For example, if a particular server is too busy the middleware might redirect the incoming requests and data to another, less busy server. If the server crashes, the middleware can fail-over to another server completely. Another service of middleware might be to provide an object-oriented view of resources on the server and translating operations on those objects into the native service requests the "real" server understands, and vice versa. That sort of brokering function is really at the core of CORBA -- Common Object Request Broker Architecture. So, middleware is anything between the client and the server: sockets, HTTP, CGI, et cetera. That's all middleware. If it is in the middle it's middleware.